Arjun Balaji

Applications are now open for the 2026 Paradigm Fellowship: a 4-day retreat for young people who are obsessively good at something technical. For our fourth year, we're expanding to welcome builders across every frontier — AI, robotics, energy, bio, prediction markets, or something we haven't thought of. Last year's cohort came from 10 countries. Some were undergrads, some were dropouts, some were founders, some came from OpenAI, SpaceX, Citadel, and Kalshi. The format is simple: firesides, whiteboarding sessions, and time to hack. What makes it special is what happens in between, and after. Fellows have met cofounders, started companies, and gone on to raise from Paradigm and others. I was a fellow before joining Paradigm, the retreat was a transformative trip for me, and I met some of my closest friends through the program. Apply by June 8th. Retreat runs August 12–15th.

@arjunblj so we’re back to prompt engineering 😂

2023: prompt engineering 2024: context engineering 2025: tool use, memory, evals 2026: grug delete waste token

We're hosting a one-day hackathon around automated research! * Thursday, April 9 (8 AM - 4 PM PT) * SF and online * Hosted by @paradigm * Compete in never-before-seen optimization challenges, or build your own projects * $9,000 in total prizes Application in 🧵

Exclusive: Andromeda started out as a project by AI-focused VC firm NFDG. Now it's a standalone startup with a run rate of $100M and a $1.5B valuation after raising $60M from Paradigm. I spoke to CEO @WMoushey about his plans to build a better market around global AI compute.

our internal agent is: 1. a postgres that coordinates everything & persists msgs 2. an API that spawns docker containers, piping container stdin to amp's stdin and streaming out the stdout as SSE 3. 150+ API keys / tool integrations that the agent can call (standard rest api) 4. a firewall that ensures the containers have no secrets and all secrets get injected on the fly when they leave the container + other sensitive stuff filtered on the way in / out + audit logs (victorialogs) + alerts 5. a slackbot interface works great

Excited for Paradigm to be investing in this latest Zipline round Congrats to @Keller and team on the stunning progress

@tkkong equator-dynamo loop unparalleled

this is where I do my 1:1s btw

The first time I worked with the 402 status code was in 2019 on the Interledger project, as a contractor for Ripple under Evan Schwartz, after a life-changing intro by Dan Robinson. That was about a year before I joined Paradigm. That was also my first Rust project, before Rust had async/await or stable futures support. We had built out abstracted settlement on top of a pair-wise based credit system, which supported onchain and offchain methods (w/ channels!), worked across N hops and any coin. It all worked, it was so magical, but the project ended up not having traction. That project has been on my mind since forever, and it's really wonderful to finally be able to ship versions of it many years later, in production, with a real tailwind (AI) that will help us make all of this inevitable.

Tempo Mainnet is live. Alongside it, we’re introducing the Machine Payments Protocol (@mpp) alongside Stripe (with extensions by Visa for cards and Lightspark for Bitcoin). Proud of the team for getting mainnet live so quickly, and excited to see what you build!

Tempo Mainnet is live! Starting today, anyone can build on Tempo through our public RPC endpoints. Alongside mainnet, we’re introducing the Machine Payments Protocol, an open standard for machine payments.

Today @phantom received first-of-its-kind no-action relief from the @CFTC. We can now connect users to regulated derivatives markets and event contracts without registering as an introducing broker. phantom.com/learn/blog/pha…

Expectation: the age of the IDE is over Reality: we’re going to need a bigger IDE (imo). It just looks very different because humans now move upwards and program at a higher level - the basic unit of interest is not one file but one agent. It’s still programming.

My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages. The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse. I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee. There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true. But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.

my simple take on agent stuff is all the perf on top of models comes from context, so you need to give it access to all your data, the most sensitive of the sensitive data, more than you've ever thought is OK to share before and that will mean you will want to self-host at scale

“yes, it’s still broken. we are trying to fix it, but we don’t know how anymore”

this is a snippet from an agent's plan I was reviewing earlier. conceptually, it feels like ~all software has been reduced down to loops like this recently:

planning hackathon on <redacted> on Thursday March 19th in our new office in sf about some cool stuff we've been buliding - if you're in sf please email me your github to georgios @ tempo dot xyz - website w/ more stuff hopefully up tmr

incredible that we built all this RAG and vector database stuff and it turns out that grep from 1973 works better than all that